The Death and Life of the Great American School System
Page 1
Table of Contents
Also by Diane Ravitch
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE - What I Learned About School Reform
CHAPTER TWO - Hijacked! How the Standards Movement Turned Into the Testing Movement
CHAPTER THREE - The Transformation of District 2
CHAPTER FOUR - Lessons from San Diego
CHAPTER FIVE - The Business Model in New York City
CHAPTER SIX - NCLB: Measure and Punish
CHAPTER SEVEN - Choice: The Story of an Idea
CHAPTER EIGHT - The Trouble with Accountability
CHAPTER NINE - What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?
CHAPTER TEN - The Billionaire Boys’ Club
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Lessons Learned
Notes
Index
Copyright Page
Also by Diane Ravitch
AUTHOR
Edspeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon
The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms
National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide
The Schools We Deserve: Reflections on the Educational Crisis of Our Times
The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980
The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools
The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973
COAUTHOR
What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature
EDITOR
Debating the Future of American Education: Do We Need National Standards and Assessments?
The American Reader
Brookings Papers on Education Policy
COEDITOR
The English Reader
Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America’s Children
Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society
City Schools: Lessons from New York
New Schools for a New Century: The Redesign of Urban Education
Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us about School Reform
The Democracy Reader
Challenges to the Humanities
Educating an Urban People: The New York City Experience
Against Mediocrity: Improving the Teaching of the Humanities in America’s High Schools
The School and the City: Community Studies in the History of American Education
This book is dedicated
with love to my grandchildren
Nico Zev
Aidan Thor
Elijah Lev
Acknowledgments
I HAVE BEEN FORTUNATE in having the help of many readers who offered their comments as the book evolved. Individual chapters, and in some cases, the entire book, were read by Samuel Abrams, Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael J. Feuer, Leonie Haimson, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Rita Kramer, Henry Levin, Jeffrey Mirel, Jeannie Oakes, Aaron Pallas, Linda Perlstein, Robert Pondiscio, Michael Ravitch, Sarah Reckhow, Richard Rothstein, Robert Shepherd, Lorraine Skeen, Sol Stern, and Andrew Wolf. Jordan Segall and Jennifer Jennings assisted me in interpreting demographic data. Of course, none of these individuals is responsible in any way for my conclusions or errors.
In pursuing information, I was helped by many people, including Anthony Alvarado, Elizabeth Arons, Kenneth J. Bernstein, Alan Bersin, Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, Andrew Beveridge, Jonathan Burman, Sheila Byrd, David Cantor, Kathleen Cashin, Carl Cohn, John de Beck, Carmen Fariña, David Ferrero, Eric Hanushek, Jeffrey Henig, Frederick Hess, Sam Houston, Dan Katzir, Richard Kessler, Mitz Lee, Robert Linn, Tom Loveless, Karen Hawley Miles, Howard Nelson, Michael Petrilli, Margaret Raymond, Bella Rosenberg, Anthony Shorris, Jacques Steinberg, Nancy Van Meter, Robin Whitlow, Joe Williams, Frances O’Neill Zimmerman, and Camille Zombro.
Barbara Bartholomew was my interlocutor in San Diego, hauling me to appointments, helping me digest what I learned, and generally keeping me on task as I interviewed teachers, administrators, and district officials.
I was fortunate to have Diana Senechal as research assistant and editor in the final stages of revising the manuscript. She made sure that every word was just right, every footnote was accurate, every URL worked, the grammar and usage were correct, and the language flowed as it was supposed to. I can never thank her enough for the time that she enthusiastically invested in this book, other than to acknowledge it here.
For supporting my research, I thank the William E. Simon Foundation and the Achelis-Bodman Foundation.
I am thankful for the friendship of inspiring mentors, past and present, including Jeanne S. Chall, Lawrence A. Cremin, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Sandra Priest Rose, and Albert Shanker.
My deepest gratitude goes to my friend, colleague, and partner, Mary, who encouraged me as I wrote this book.
I thank my energetic literary agent, Lynn Chu of Writers Representatives, who believed in this project from the beginning. Many thanks to Meredith Smith and Antoinette Smith of Basic Books for their careful review of the manuscript, and to Lynn Goldberg and Angela Hayes of Goldberg-McDuffie, who gave me their wholehearted support. And I am grateful to Tim Sullivan, my editor at Basic Books, who quickly understood the book and suggested the title of my dreams. We both agreed that the title is a fitting homage to Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities helped to create a renaissance in the nation’s cities. Since I live the life that she wrote about, in a wonderful urban neighborhood saved by historic preservation, I love the idea of associating my book with hers, most especially with the hope that American education in general and urban education in particular might also experience a renaissance.
DIANE RAVITCH BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
CHAPTER ONE
What I Learned About School Reform
IN THE FALL OF 2007, I reluctantly decided to have my office repainted. It was inconvenient. I work at home, on the top floor of a nineteenth-century brownstone in Brooklyn. Not only did I have to stop working for three weeks, but I had the additional burden of packing up and removing everything in my office. I had to relocate fifty boxes of books and files to other rooms in the house until the painting job was complete.
After the patching, plastering, and painting was done, I began unpacking twenty years of papers and books, discarding those I no longer wanted, and placing articles into scrapbooks. You may wonder what all this mundane stuff has to do with my life in the education field. I found that the chore of reorganizing the artifacts of my professional life was pleasantly ruminative. It had a tonic effect, because it allowed me to reflect on the changes in my views over the years.
At the very time that I was packing up my books and belongings, I was going through an intellectual crisis. I was aware that I had undergone a wrenching transformation in my perspective on school reform. Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound doubts about these same ideas. I was trying to sort through the evidence about what was working and what was not. I was trying to understand why I was increasingly skeptical about these reforms, reforms that I had supported enthusiastically. I was trying to see my way through the blinding assumptions of ideology and politics, including my own.
I kept asking myself why I was losing confidence in these reforms. My answer: I have a right to change my mind. Fair enough. But why, I kept wondering, why had I changed my mind? What was the compelling evidence that prompted m
e to reevaluate the policies I had endorsed many times over the previous decade? Why did I now doubt ideas I once had advocated?
The short answer is that my views changed as I saw how these ideas were working out in reality. The long answer is what will follow in the rest of this book. When someone chastised John Maynard Keynes for reversing himself about a particular economic policy he had previously endorsed, he replied, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”1 This comment may or may not be apocryphal, but I admire the thought behind it. It is the mark of a sentient human being to learn from experience, to pay close attention to how theories work out when put into practice.
What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.
The task of sorting my articles gave me the opportunity to review what I had written at different times, beginning in the mid-1960s. As I flipped from article to article, I kept asking myself, how far had I strayed from where I started? Was it like me to shuffle off ideas like an ill-fitting coat? As I read and skimmed and remembered, I began to see two themes at the center of what I have been writing for more than four decades. One constant has been my skepticism about pedagogical fads, enthusiasms, and movements. The other has been a deep belief in the value of a rich, coherent school curriculum, especially in history and literature, both of which are so frequently ignored, trivialized, or politicized.2
Over the years, I have consistently warned against the lure of “the royal road to learning,” the notion that some savant or organization has found an easy solution to the problems of American education. As a historian of education, I have often studied the rise and fall of grand ideas that were promoted as the sure cure for whatever ills were afflicting our schools and students. In 1907, William Chandler Bagley complained about the “fads and reforms that sweep through the educational system at periodic intervals.” A few years later, William Henry Maxwell, the esteemed superintendent of schools in New York City, heaped scorn on educational theorists who promoted their panaceas to gullible teachers; one, he said, insisted that “vertical penmanship” was the answer to all problems; another maintained that recess was a “relic of barbarism.” Still others wanted to ban spelling and grammar to make school more fun.3 I have tried to show in my work the persistence of our national infatuation with fads, movements, and reforms, which invariably distract us from the steadiness of purpose needed to improve our schools.
In our own day, policymakers and business leaders have eagerly enlisted in a movement launched by free-market advocates, with the support of major foundations. Many educators have their doubts about the slogans and cure-alls of our time, but they are required to follow the mandates of federal law (such as No Child Left Behind) despite their doubts.
School reformers sometimes resemble the characters in Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, who are always searching for that mythical land “where they never have troubles, at least very few.” Or like Dumbo, they are convinced they could fly if only they had a magic feather. In my writings, I have consistently warned that, in education, there are no shortcuts, no utopias, and no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.
As I flipped through the yellowing pages in my scrapbooks, I started to understand the recent redirection of my thinking, my growing doubt regarding popular proposals for choice and accountability. Once again, I realized, I was turning skeptical in response to panaceas and miracle cures. The only difference was that in this case, I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures; I too had drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems. I too had jumped aboard a bandwagon, one festooned with banners celebrating the power of accountability, incentives, and markets. I too was captivated by these ideas. They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools, and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope. I wanted to share the promise and the hope. I wanted to believe that choice and accountability would produce great results. But over time, I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost the faith.
It seemed, therefore, that it would be instructive to take a fresh look at the reform strategies that are now so prominent in American education and to review the evidence of their effectiveness. This book is my opportunity to explain what I have learned about school reform and also to suggest, with (I hope) a certain degree of modesty and full acknowledgment of my own frailties and errors, what is needed to move American education in the right direction.
THE FIRST ARTICLE I EVER WROTE about education was published in a small (and now defunct) education journal called the Urban Review in 1968. Its title—“Programs, Placebos, Panaceas”—signaled what turned out to be a constant preoccupation for me, the conflict between promise and reality, between utopian hopes and knotty problems. I reviewed short-term compensatory education programs—that is, short-term interventions to help kids who were far behind—and concluded that “only sustained quality education makes a difference.” My second article, titled “Foundations: Playing God in the Ghetto” (1969), discussed the Ford Foundation’s role in the protracted controversy over decentralization and community control that led to months of turmoil in the public schools of New York City.4 This question—the extent to which it is appropriate for a mega-rich foundation to take charge of reforming public schools, even though it is accountable to no one and elected by no one—will be treated in this book. The issue is especially important today, because some of the nation’s largest foundations are promoting school reforms based on principles drawn from the corporate sector, without considering whether they are appropriate for educational institutions.
In the late 1960s, the issue of decentralization versus centralization turned into a heated battle. Newspapers featured daily stories about community groups demanding decentralization of the schools and blaming teachers and administrators for the school system’s lack of success with minority children. Many school reformers then assumed that African American and Hispanic parents and local community leaders, not professional educators, knew best what their children needed.
As the clamor to decentralize the school system grew, I became curious about why the system had been centralized in the first place. I spent many days in the New-York Historical Society library studying the history of the city’s school system; the last such history had been published in 1905. I discovered that the system had been decentralized in the nineteenth century. The school reformers of the 1890s demanded centralization as an antidote to low-performing schools and advocated control by professionals as the cure for the incompetence and corruption of local school boards. As I read, I was struck by the ironic contrast between the reformers’ demands in the 1890s for centralization and the reformers’ demands in the 1960s for decentralization. The earlier group consisted mainly of social elites, the latter of parents and activists who wanted local control of the schools.
So intrigued was I by the contrast between past and present that I determined to write a history of the New York City public schools, which became The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973.5 This was quite a challenge for someone who had graduated from the Houston public schools and—at that time—had no advanced degrees in history or education. As I was completing the book, I earned a doctorate fro
m Columbia University in the history of American education, and the book became my dissertation. While writing and pursuing my graduate studies, I worked under the tutelage of Lawrence Cremin, the greatest historian of American education of his era.
In the mid-1970s, Cremin persuaded me to write a critique of a group of leftist historians who attacked the underpinnings of public schooling. They called themselves revisionists, because they set themselves the goal of demolishing what they saw as a widespread myth about the benevolent purposes and democratic accomplishments of public education. The authors, all of them professors at various universities, treated the public schools scornfully as institutions devised by elites to oppress the poor. This point of view was so contrary to my own understanding of the liberating role of public education—not only in my own life but also in the life of the nation—that I felt compelled to refute it.
The resulting book was called The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools.6 In that book, I defended the democratic, civic purposes of public schooling. I argued that the public schools had not been devised by scheming capitalists to impose “social control” on an unwilling proletariat or to reproduce social inequality; the schools were never an instrument of cultural repression, as the radical critics claimed. Instead, I held, they are a primary mechanism through which a democratic society gives its citizens the opportunity to attain literacy and social mobility. Opportunity leaves much to individuals; it is not a guarantee of certain success. The schools cannot solve all our social problems, nor are they perfect. But in a democratic society, they are necessary and valuable for individuals and for the commonweal.